Has Cleggism's moment already passed?

The advent of Nick Clegg has led to an outbreak of chin rubbing and head scratching from political commentators all over the globe. On the whole they’re understandably excited about something unusual happening somewhere as predictable as Westminster, while admitting that our novel coalition government is not all that different from the way politics works in their country of origin. My own guilty admission is that until the first debate I was still thinking of “Oh look! It’s Nick Clegg!” every time Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, appeared on TV. It still surprises me how English the guy looks (Medvedev, not Clegg). But I can’t shake the sensation that Clegg and his Lib Dems have messed up. Surely without having secured a rock solid agreement for a referendum on the single transferable vote as the main plank of their coalition agreement, they have doomed themselves to a short term in a coalition followed by obscurity again, possibly for another 40 years? I realise that the prospect of any kind of power must have been intoxicating for them, but why was an agreement reached so quickly? I would have thought that time was on their side. The convention wisdom says that there was some appalling pressure due to the dire economic circumstances. But we’ve known all about that for months, if not years. Capitulating to such a bullying ruse should have been resistable in the name of pursuing the party’s fundamental interests. Probably there is an egocentric Liberal Democrat theory around Westminster that, having fallen for Cleggy charms so easily, we will now be similarly impressed by the cut of his party’s gib in government. But isn’t it more likely that this coalition will collapse in relatively short order, as coalitions are apt to do, and that the Lib Dems will become the lightning rod for all the discontent that will arise from the confusion? I’d always thought that the Lib Dems must have spent every hour of their political careers planning for the moment that occurred last week: the brief, magical interlude in which when they had some genuine political power. But now I’m wondering whether the old stereotype about woolly thinking was right all along? Return to the Expat front page